Fragments of Him out on May 3rd! May 2, 2016
In case you missed it last week: Fragments of Him is coming out tomorrow (May 3rd)!
You will be able to get it on Steam or the Humble Store tomorrow at 11:00AM CEST (2AM PDT, 5AM EST).
The Xbox One version of Fragments of Him will follow shortly after the Steam release. Sadly, this version has suffered a delay due to a stability issue. We are working on getting these fixed and will post an update as soon as we know more.
If you want to be notified by Steam when the game launches, you should add the game to your Steam Wishlist.
On Streaming & YouTube April 29, 2016
Fragments of Him has been a labour of love for well over 2 years and soon everyone will be able to enjoy the experience we have carefully crafted during this time. Due to the special nature of Fragments of Him we have a favour to ask of our Let’s Play community.
What we ask of everyone who uploads gameplay for the enjoyment of others is a simple request: please do not upload a full playthrough of Fragments of Him without your commentary or creative input. While we believe that Let’s Plays and similar formats add a great amount of value to games as a whole, as Fragments of Him is a narrative drama and we are dependent on the story we have drafted, simply uploading game footage would spoil this experience immensely. We believe that simply uploading the game footage does not benefit the community and is a harmful practice for developers. For a two-man studio this could be the difference between us being able to craft another project for your enjoyment or calling it quits.
We respect that you want to share the games that you love, and we hope that you are excited to share some of your experiences with Fragments of Him. For this reason, we currently have no intention of having any Content IDs on the game or its music, and will not claim (or take down) any of your videos. We respect the work that you put into your videos, all we ask in return is that you respect the work that we have done: please add your own contributions to the videos, don’t publish only a screen capture your play.
A way of sharing creative content with your audience that benefits everyone is by showing and discussing your experience of a portion of Fragments of Him up to a point that you deem is fair. From concept to consumption, if we don’t work together in bringing games to an audience in a way that supports the creators then we are condemning experiences such as linear narrative games before they are made.
Streaming is a little different: it goes directly to an engaged audience and is a live, interactive medium. We love streaming and hang out on Twitch daily, as such you’re free to stream Fragments of Him to your viewers and we’d love to hear what you (and your viewers) think of the experience.
Put simply, if you want developers to keep making story-based campaigns, or games like Fragments of Him which are very heavily narrative-experience focused, please think carefully before sharing past the mid or late-game content, which for us is from after the first hour or-so.
Once again, we do not want to take down or claim any of your videos and look forward to seeing them, but please make them your video, not only re-sharing our content. Also don’t forget to send them to us, we love seeing what everyone thinks of the game!
Sassybot at SXSW 2016 – Part 2 March 23, 2016
In part 2 of the SXSW blog you can read about the day by day of the Sassybot adventure at SXSW in Austin. In this blog you can get tips & tricks showcasing your game at an exposition, know how Fragments of Him did in the competitions for the SXSW Single Player Gamer’s Voice Awards, and how the trip back home wasn’t as easy as we had hoped.
Day 1
The Gaming Expo that Fragments of Him was part of took place in the Austin Convention Centre. Elwin and I stayed at the Radisson hotel and getting to the convention centre took about 5 minutes. This hotel was much fancier than what we would normally stay in but we were able to make this work by saving on transportation expenses.
Pro tip: Find accommodation close to your purpose and save on time and transportation expenses.
The Gaming Expo was from Thursday (March 17th) until Saturday (March 19th) and lasted from 12:00 until 20:00. Thursday morning we could set up from 8:00 onwards and was plenty of time for us to set up. Here is what we took with us:
We are not endorsed by Logitech though we could have been. They have set us up with additional hardware for showcasing. Namely:
When showcasing, our general approach was to ask anyone if we could explain what Fragments of Him was about. In our case nearly everyone was interested in hearing more where people mentioned it was the unique visual style that caught their attention. When deciding on demo content make sure that your game or experience is curated in such a way that it grabs attention, is not too long, not too short, gives a pleasurable or interesting experience, and leaves the person wanting for more. After having played the demo you can explain the person more about the game such as when it will be released, at what price point, and where more information can be found. Finally, we gave people that played the demo a free poster.
Insight: With 2 demo laptops with a 5 to 10 minute demo and 1 laptop running trailers we think that no more than 500 people got to play the demo at 3 days of showcasing at SXSW with 8 hours of showcasing per day.
Pro tip: Before you travel, build your booth according to the booth’s specifications. This will raise issues you can deal with beforehand to be optimally prepared. Also think about how you can make your booth look unique and inviting.
Day 2
The second day had the same 12:00 to 20:00 schedule and makes it apparent that showcasing is definitely a 2 person job. Especially with a public event it is recommended to have an extra person to keep an eye on the valuable things during food or bathroom breaks. Out of the three, this day was definitely easiest considering the visitor number and that we could leave the less valuable things with the booth overnight.
Events such as SXSW and similar are a great way to build your connections and networks. If you can spare the time it’s definitely worth it to stop by the other booths to get to know the people. These people can likely help you out with information and contacts in the future if you are nice to them. Try and tag along with a group of interesting people for food and drinks in the evening and these connections can be mutually beneficial for the future.
Pro tip: Showcasing or talking at an event usually comes with certain perks and benefits such as free food and drinks which helps drive down expenses.
Day 3
The last day, Saturday, was easily the busiest of the three. The public showcase was cut short because of the SXSW Gaming Award Show that started at 20:00. It was streamed via Twitch and can be seen here:
Congratulations to all the great games and people that were nominated and especially to the people that rightly earned awards in their respective categories. Fragments of Him was nominated for a Single Player Gamer’s Voice Award. As the title implies, the winner here was determined by the people and the gamers. Votes could be cast during the Gaming Expo up to 2 hours before the show. The winner in our category was Super Hot and judging from the crowd’s response, rightly so.
Pro tip: Promote your attendance and make appointments with press weeks or even months before an event to increase the effectiveness of an event.
Day 4 & 5
With our time in Austin coming to an end we were itching to get back home. This was easier said than done. Our flight back took us from Austin to Atlanta, Paris, and finally Amsterdam. When we left on Sunday we were informed about Paris’ air control personnel holding a strike, severely hindering all flights passing that port. This caused us about a total of 6 hours in delays.
Roadmap
We are close to getting the game ready for release and have had to move our release window to a month later. Don’t worry, it’s still going to be in 2016. 😉 However, we are not yet ready to pinpoint an exact date considering some of the delay is subject to external approval. We are very excited about getting this story into your hands as soon as we can.
Sassybot at SXSW 2016 – Part 1 March 16, 2016
This is the first of possibly a series of blogs covering our showcase of Fragments of Him at the SXSW Gaming Expo which is part of the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The entire SXSW festival lasts from March 10th until March 20th. The SXSW Gaming Expo is from March 17th until March 19th. For convenience sake I’ll consider March 17th to be the first day of our three day showcasing adventure.
Day -1 – Arrival
On Tuesday March 15th Elwin and I traveled to Austin, Texas via Minneapolis. We departed from Schiphol at 13:00 and arrived around 21:00 (local time) in Texas. Considering a time difference of 6 hours this trip took around 14 hours to get us from airport to airport and around 16 hours from Breda to our hotel. Perhaps a bit typical but very much indie gamedev, Elwin was in the process of submitting a build overnight for the Xbox One certification which ultimately had to be finished from Schiphol.
Day 0 – Day of writing
The show starts tomorrow and Elwin and I used this day to get our bearings and sort some things such as exhibitor passes and supplies. While waiting for rental bikes to be dropped off we noticed a large amount of police parked at all driveways and intersections along the street of our hotel. Apparently the first lady, Michelle Obama, gave a talk at SXSW and this resulted in the streets being blocked off for the occasion. Pretty cool to have seen this by coincidence.
To be continued…
Tomorrow is the first day of showcasing Fragments of Him which is very exciting. If time and opportunity allows for it we will try to post an update on our adventures in a future blog. In the meantime, keep creating and never give up!
Update on Fragments of Him Release March 4, 2016
Hey everyone,
In this blog I will give you an update on Fragments of Him and our thoughts closing in on release.
Pre-order update
You may have noticed on Steam that we are aiming to release nearing the end of March though we are not 100% sure about this yet. Be sure to keep an eye out on our channels where we will publish a launch trailer with an exact date when we have one!
Have you pre-ordered the game already? Awesome! We thank you for your support and can’t wait to finally deliver the game to you. We do however have an announcement to share with you regarding the price you pre-ordered it at.
At the advice of Valve (& others) we have decided to start with a 10% launch discount (which is already active on our own site), which will last until a week after launch. Since we don’t think it’s fair that people pay more than those who have waited, we will be contacting everyone shortly via email to give you some options regarding your pre-order, it’ll be worth it!
The Game
Updates on the game have been fairly silent for quite a while and I apologise for that. The game was suffering from issues caused by a mandatory upgrade in game engine. Talking about this made it feel as if we weren’t making any progress at all and that the game was only getting worse. Ultimately, the problems that the game was facing should no longer be an issue.
The experience in Fragments of Him is hitting the right notes with our testers and we have recently been doing compatibility testing with small groups of players. What we generally test for here is how the game performs on consumer grade hardware. We do this by sending out Steam keys to peers, friends and family and ask them to play the game and report any problems they might run into.
When the game releases on Steam and Xbox One we really hope that people are able to enjoy the experience we have spent countless hours on crafting. Even though we hope the launch will go smooth, history and Murphey with his laws have taught us that it rarely does. Regardless, we will always listen to the issues you may have with the game and will try to address what we can within reason.
Thank you for listening and I hope to be able to count on your support.